Microsoft News 13-August-2015

Hi folks, it’s been a while since I’ve posted but there’s a great reason for that – I got married and was away on honeymoon 🙂 We’re back and trying to get back into the normal swing of things. I was away for the Windows 10 launch, happily ignoring the world. Windows 10 in the businesses is not a big deal yet – Microsoft needs to clear up licensing and activation for businesses before they’ll deliberately touch the great new OS – I’ve already had customers say “love it, but not until we get clarification”.

Hyper-V

• What’s New for Hyper-V on Windows 10: The new features in Windows 10 Client Hyper-V.
• Why Does Hyper-V Have Network Issues with 1 GbE NICs? Because OEMs write crappy drivers and firmware.
• PowerShell Direct – handling authentication for better scripting: 4 options for authenticating your remote access.
• Using PowerShell Direct for Script Locking: Stop your script until the VM is responsive.
• Sending a script file into the VM using PowerShell Direct: Copy a script file into a VM to run it.
• PowerShell Direct + Hot Add NIC == Give me an IP address: Add a NIC to a VM and configure it.
• PowerShell Direct & Waiting for an IP Address: Wait for a VM to get an IP address before running your PowerShell.
• Upgrading your Virtual Machine version: A new manual step to allow your VM to use new features.
• Production Checkpoints in Windows 10: A new way of doing checkpoints where a restore is like restoring a VM from backup.
• Integration components available for virtual machines not connected to Windows Update: Out of band methods for updating the Hyper-V ICs for VMs on Windows 10 or WS2016.
• Hyper-V Storage QoS in Windows Server 2016 Works on SOFS and on LUNs/CSVs: Distributed Storage QoS will also work with block level storage (CSV required).

Windows Server

• Introducing pen remoting for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016: Handy.
• Receive Side Scaling for the File Servers: Enable RSS on file servers with 10 GbE or faster networks.

Windows

• Windows 10 – Available for Business Today: Unfortunately, no one has the answers on volume licensing upgrades, product keys and activation.
• 90 day Windows 10 Enterprise Evaluation: Handy to have access to for demos, trials, etc.
• Announcing the availability of System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager SP1 and System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP2: Adding support for Windows 10.
• Step-By-Step – How to Clean Install Windows 10: This is not easy, thanks to licensing and activations. I have no idea how this will work in mid-large businesses.
• Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) for Windows 10: Automate a large-scale deployment of Windows 10 – when you’ve figured out the licensing.
• Windows 10 ADK and Configuration Manager: Large scale image deployment.
• Find and Update Your KMS Service Host Key To Activate Windows 10: A post by Didier Van Hoye, MVP.

Azure

• Working with Marketplace Images on Azure Resource Manager: Include templates in your mass deployments.
• Azure Marketplace announces new features and functionality: Big thing here is the ability to deploy Multi-VMs.
• Azure Site Recovery GA – Move VMware, AWS, Hyper-V and Physical Servers to Azure: Not just a DR solution, but also an official migration solutions for Hyper-V, vSphere, and AWS. The post is quite unclear about the mechanisms/methods being employed (aka Marketing Gone Wild).
• Can’t recover VMs in Azure with volumes greater than 1TB? Use Storage Spaces: I am not sure that this is supported on Hyper-V, so I am advising caution.
• Enterprise Grade Disaster Recovery with Azure Site Recovery, EMC VMAX, VMAX3 and SRDF – Now Generally Available: SCVMM/Hyper-V environments that use EMC VMAX and VMAX3 SAN arrays can leverage industry leading technology in SRDF with ASR to protect complex multi-vm applications in a group consistent manner while ensuring that the most stringent RPO and RTO SLA requirements are met.
• Tagging on Compute, Network and Storage Resources: Consistent use of tags on Compute, Network, and Storage resources created through the Azure Resource Manager allows organizations to track their usage in a new way.
• Scheduling Azure Automation Runbooks with Azure Scheduler: Scheduled automation.
• Azure Backup enables backup of large volumes, VMs, databases and more: Data sources up to 54400 GB now supported. Note that file servers with > 1 million files in a volume may require up to 20% of that volume for caching.
• Microsoft’s Project Venus – Extending Azure Backup Features: How Microsoft will extend the functionality of Azure Backup, using a free DPM as a stepping stone.
• Budgeting Struggles with Cloud Computing: Azure prices went up 10% in the Euro zone and 26% in Australia this month.
• Azure Virtual Machines SLA – A Primer: People are making assumptions about SLA that will get them into trouble.
• July updates to Azure RemoteApp: Not much that I can see.
• Step-By-Step – Protect physical servers with Azure Site Recovery: Using Azure as a DR site for physical servers.

System Center

• Description of Update Rollup 7 for System Center 2012 R2: Wait at least one month before installing. And make sure you read the instructions.

Office 365

• Office 2016 for Mac is here: Those of you with overpriced handbag laptops get an Office update.
• Office Mobile apps for Windows 10 are here: Office is now a universal app. Can’t wait to try this on a phone with Continuum.

Miscellaneous

• Windows 10’s Continuum Killed the Personal Computer: An opinion piece I wrote for Petri.com.